7.8 KiB
They can delete your data and the value of your data like this
0. Some ranting and a blueprint for the future.
I'm going to outline a few things that I think are really bad patterns with current software and creators ecosystems. Then I'm gonna tell you what I think we should do about it.
1. You don't own anything
For a long time, i've been increasingly frustrated with software that I have to use on a daily basis. This is due to a number of factors:
Software in the ancient times
In the prehistoric period of owning computers and software, you'd buy some software and you'd use it on on your computer. The data you created was saved in files on floppy and then hard drives.
This was a very plesant state of affairs. As long as your computer kept working, you could use the software indefinitely and get the same value from it.
There were significatn downsides to storing data locally, and it was a fairly common thing for people to completely lose important information, reports, source code etc. if it wasn't backed up somewhere else, which was not a common thing for most people to do.
Modern day
Today, almost no software works this way. The sofware we use is either a website where the software is delivered when you access the website, and almost never works offline, or it's "software as a service" where in place of owning a licence of the software indefinitely, you now need to pay monthly forever for the same thing.
Your data is stored on a remote server that a company owns, and often, if you don't meet the requirements that company has for using their service, you can lose all access to that data. You also have no idea what's being done with your data. Althogh companies publish privacy policies, the only time you'd discover if whey they said was actually true would be if they got investigated. This almost never happens, so regardless of their promises, they might be just allowing their employees to watch you via your smart camera.
Why did this happen?
For websites, it sort of makes sense that this happened. Websites used to be rendered on a server and sent to your web browser, so it kind of made sense that all the data would be held on the server. For things like Gmail, the server computers were much more powerful than your client running a web browser, so they could do things like index all your mail and give you instant search. This was super valuable in an age when email was the primary form of electronic information exchange, and computers and hard drives were relatively slow.
Today even your phone is incredibly fast and could search hundreds of megs of text in milliseconds and web pages are no longer dumb clients to complex servers, in fact it's pretty much the other way around! Web apps are increasingly complex and tend to pull data via an API on the server. There's been a recent swing back to server rendered pages, but given today's web APIs, it's completely possible to delived a completely offline experience and do pretty much everything locally.
For downloadable software, the pitch was that instead of getting a single version of the software, you would now get all updates as long as you continued to subscribe, and that ongoing paymets would fund ongoing development and innovation.
If you tended to upgrade to new versions, that seems to be pretty much equivalent, but there are a couple of hidden problems that eventually came to dominate this model. Firstly, for things like Photoshop, the pace of innovation pretty much plataued. Yes there are amazing new AI tools in the most recent versions of PS, but if you don't use those new tools and are just a traditional user, the appliaction hasn't really changed in a decade. Secondly, Even if the price were equivalent, if you stop paying, then you lose access. So that's not equivalent at all.
Ultimately, this wasn't about delivering software innovation. It was about maximizing profits for the companies that make the software. If you need to keep subscribing forever, they can turn what used to be a one-time $200 purchase, into a lifetime of payment for new features, regardless if you want them or not.
Over time, this meant that users don't own anything. They dont own their software and they don't own their data.
The shifting sands of UX
This new software model also creates what I call the Shifting Sands of UX. The new software model requires constant innovation to justify the ongoing subscription cost to users, which means in turn that there are people who's job it is to come into work on a Monday morning and to "innoavte", whether the software needs it or not. The result is that every piece of software that I use now regularly changes its user interface in ways that often make the software worse for my use-case.
The software could be completely perfect from my point of view, but it must and will change because of the model we're now in, there is no alternative, and if you can't innovate for real; change the UI! (see gmail, slack, another, another)
2. Middlemen separate creators and their fans.
Gamers are happy to pay fo excellent games. Music fans are happy to pay for excellent music. Moviegoers are happy to pay for excellent movies. In general people are happy to pay for excellent creative content of all forms.
Prehistoric times
In the olden days, you could either listen to the radio, or go to a store and buy a record, casette or CD. You could then listen to that music as much as you liked "offline".
Modern day
Today we can listen to pretty much any track we like from any artist instantly by using a streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music or by finding music on YouTube. This is truly like a superpower and completely mindblowing compared to how we used to listen to music!
The downside is that in order to provide this service, all the music has to be uploaded to a central service that a company owns, and the company charges a fee to stream the music to users, giving the some small part to the musicians. The fee that the streaming services have been charging has been increasing ever since they launched meaning that over time, the wealth is being moved from the musicians who actually create the music to the companies who stream it and now have a monopoly on those streaming services. They also gatekeep who can get onto the services.
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